Contemplating Identity

Warning: This is a stream-of-consciousness rant. Read at your own bewilderment!

Why aren’t I asleep? Sigh. This has been an epoch-making season, in a quiet sort of way. Some small decisions, and quite a few larger ones, keep creeping up. It’s the day-to-day stuff, though, that really tests one’s inner resources. Like “who am I, really?” I feel like (gulp) I’m growing up, though some of my thought processes seem to be heading in the direction of abject immaturity as I’m playing, exploring.

Mostly, I’m giving myself permission to feel. Now, I have no problem feeling for my friends, or the world, or weeping openly at “Mercy Seat” as rendered by Johnny Cash ; no, I mean reflecting on and allowing myself to feel in my own life, my own interior space…like, where am I going in life? Do I _want_ to go there or am I being expected to? Need those conflict? I’m thinking, not necessarily, but I haven’t really let myself react out a gut innocence; my every motion is choreographed and contrived by some remote composer deep in my psyche.
…I suppose what I’m saying is, I’ve always been possessed with a rather strong sense of my own destiny, but in that I’ve become too driven, methinks. I’ve become far too bottom-line, and though I talk alot about silence and stillness and resting in the Lord, in reality, by spirit is all but bereft of Being in the present moment.

Last week I told several friends of mine that I feel like the shallow guy in a room full of deep, hurting people. I was sort of thinking about it in a happy sense, like, “at least I don’t have all these issues.” Well, Tori rejoined, “You are wounded, Mike. You have to be. The Lord wounds those he loves and re-mends them in honesty and tenderness. You don’t recognize your own inner woundedness because you’ve become hardened to it.” I think she might be right, though I say this like a character in Philip K. Dick story might: with absolutely no memory, or recollection of why this might be so, but only a gnawing resolve to grope toward the Light.
Thank God for an indwelling Christ. Thank God for a habitat, the ecclesia. And thank God for a whole, big, wide world, bursting with wonder, waiting to greet us.

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About Mike Morrell

Mike Morrell is the collaborating author, with Fr. Richard Rohr, on The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation. He's also the founder of Wisdom Camp, a retreat for mystical misfits, and a founding organizer of the justice, arts, and spirituality Wild Goose Festival.
Mike curates contemplative and community experiences
via Relational Yoga, the ManKind Project, and Authentic North Carolina,
taking joy in holding space for the extraordinary transformation that can
take place at the intersection of anticipation, imagination, and radical
acceptance.
Mike is also an avid writer, publishing consultant, author coach, futurist, and curator of the book-reviewing community, Speakeasy. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Asheville, North Carolina.